Infinidat looks set to add ultra-fast NVMe-over-Fabrics access to its INFINIBOX arrays.

The company has not gone public yet but a source tells me that it demonstrated NVMe-over-Fabrics access to an INFINIBOX array at a recent customer event in Boston, Mass.

I hear from a customer attendee that a sample workload completed with latency under 50usec as measured from the host. The NVMe-oF access accelerated access to the INFINIBOX memory caching technology and provided faster data access than all-flash arrays.

We asked Infinidat CTO Brian Carmody if Infinidat plans to provide NVMe-oF functionality to its INFINIBOX arrays. He responded with a crisp: “No comment.”

Infinidat CTO Brian Carmod.

INFINIBOX is already fast

These high-end high-capacity monolithic arrays use disk to store their data and memory caching to deliver high cache hit rates on reads. Performance is comparable to, if not faster than, all-flash arrays.

If NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMe-oF) were used instead, data access latency would reduce by effectively extending a server’s PCIe bus out to the shared, external array. This is a much faster link than, say, 16 or 32Gbit/s Fibre Channel, with storage array LUN access requests passing across it.

A LUN is a Logical Unit Number which references a logical volume of block storage accessed by applications running in a server. The storage array controller receives a LUN read or write access request and converts the LUN into actual disk or flash drives.